Vayakhel

The Beauty of Holiness or the Holiness of Beauty In Ki Tissa and in Vayakhel we encounter the figure of Betzalel, a rare type in the Hebrew Bible – the artist, the craftsman, the shaper of beauty in the service of God, the man who, together with Oholiab, fashioned the articles associated with the Tabernacle. […]

Making Space With this week’s double parsha, with its long account of the construction of the sanctuary – one of the longest narratives in the Torah, taking a full 13 chapters – comes to a magnificent climax: Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the Sanctuary. Moses could not enter […]

Encampments & Journeys Right at the end of the book of Shemot, there is a textual difficulty so slight that it is easy to miss, yet – as interpreted by Rashi – it contains one of the great clues as to the nature of Jewish identity; it is a moving testimony to the unique challenge […]

The Social Animal At the beginning of Vayakhel Moses performs a tikkun, a mending of the past, namely the sin of the Golden Calf. The Torah signals this by using essentially the same word at the beginning of both episodes. It eventually became a key word in Jewish spirituality, k-h-l, “to gather, assemble, congregate.” From it we […]

The Spirit of Community What do you do when your people has just made a golden calf, run riot and lost its sense of ethical and spiritual direction? How do you restore moral order – not just then in the days of Moses, but even now? The answer lies in the first word of today’s […]

Team-Building How do you re-motivate a demoralized people? How do you put the pieces of a broken nation back together again? That was the challenge faced by Moses in this week’s parsha. The key word here is vayakhel, “Moses gathered.” Kehillah means community. A kehillah or kahal is a group of people assembled for a given purpose. That purpose can be positive […]

Three Types of Community A long drama had taken place. Moses had led the people from slavery to the beginning of the road to freedom. The people themselves had witnessed G-d at Mount Sinai, the only time in all history when an entire people became the recipients of revelation. Then came the disappearance of Moses […]

Mirrors of Love The Torah in Parshat Vayakhel, which describes the making of the Mishkan, goes out of its way to emphasize the role women played in it: The men accompanied the women, and those who wanted to make a donation brought bracelets, earrings, finger rings, and body ornaments, all made of gold. (35:22) Every […]

God’s Shadow In Vayakhel we meet for the second time the man who became the symbol of the artist in Judaism, Bezalel: Then Moses said to the Israelites, “See, the Lord has chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and he has filled him with the spirit of […]

Where does the Divine Presence live? Finally the long narrative of the construction of the Tabernacle – to which the Torah devotes more space than any other single subject – is at an end. The building, its frame, drapes and sacred furniture, were complete. Moses inspects the finished project. We then read: The Israelites had […]